Busting myths and finding time

- I'm going to help you bust some limiting beliefs about coaching so you can become a great manager and coach. Recently I was coaching a senior VP whose goal was to transition to the executive level as a COO. And Sylvia was incredibly adept at analyzing a problem, pinpointing solutions, but she was extremely frustrated with how slowly her solutions were implemented and how often she ran into full stop resistance from her team. Now what we discovered was that Sylvia's command and control style and her need for speed was actually responsible for slowing progress and productivity. She wasn't leading. She was running five miles ahead of everyone expecting them to keep up. She told me she didn't have time for handholding, and that is the first myth to bust that coaching is handholding. So coaching is not doing the work yourself or telling people what to do step by step. It's establishing clear expectations and goals and guiding, questioning, prompting to accomplish them. Most importantly, it's inspiring people to take ownership of their work and their careers. And that leads right into myth number two, there's no time. This is big. I mean, we're constantly challenged to do more with less. So if you start having coaching one-on-one, she might think you'll never get anything done. In Sylvia's case, she was spending a lot of time backtracking, redirecting, putting out fires, and all of that slowed her team's productivity to a crawl. Now I want to be clear. The coaching tools and practices you'll be exploring in this course are designed to help you become more collaborative, less directive, and more efficient. You'll be giving people more autonomy, which will save time in the long run and increase engagement and results. Myth number three goes like so, if I grow my people, I'll lose my people. So here's the deal. Research repeatedly shows that people don't leave their jobs, they leave bad managers. They leave because they are not getting growth opportunities. They leave because of invisibility and exclusion. So managing in a way that creates a revolving door of average talent is a job killer, your job. The flip side of this myth is that by growing your talent, you're actually constantly creating value for yourself, for your people and your company. Myth number four, career development is the employee's responsibility. Now that's partly true. Your people are responsible for driving their careers, but we all need collaborators. We need people who will work with us to unlock our strengths and purposefulness and help us make use of them for everyone's benefit. Now in my experience, there is no question that coaching can turn around a disengaged rudderless employee. But coaching is also essential if you want to keep your high potentials and create great results all around. So right now, I want you to pause for a moment and head down to the note taking feature and do three things. First, write a promise to yourself to let the myths go so you can be free to experiment. Second, write down the names of two or three people you'd love to help grow and why. What's in it for them? What's in it for you? These are the people you'll be experimenting with throughout the course to develop your coaching skills. And third, open up your calendar and identify where you have two or three chunks of time you can block out every week. (light upbeat music) You might be tempted to say nowhere, but you're creating a new habit. So protect that space in your calendar. The goal here is to just get started. Three people, three chunks of time. And remember, you're just experimenting.